Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This is way off our genre. Lolita was controversial when it was published in 1955, and it at least that controversial today. It was suggested to me by a literature professor (brother-in-law) while we sat in a restaurant in St. Petersburg. He had just come from the Nabokov home there, where the author lived until the age of 20 when his family fled from the Russian revolution. He was to become a literature professor in the United States. Nabokov was a master of several languages, and he was well-known for the many novels that were written in Russian. This one was written in English and published in the U.S. The controversy? It’s a story about pedophilia, the main character’s romantic feelings for a 12-year-old girl. While it is clearly written in the absurd in remarkably beautiful language, it still left this reader feeling most uncomfortable throughout. I finished it because I was interested in seeing how Nabokov would bring this bizarre story to a conclusion.

It’s not an easy book to review, so I’ll borrow material from an abstract by the publisher, Vintage International: “Published in 1955, Lolita became an instant sensation, establishing Vladimir Nabokov’s reputation as one of the great prose stylists of the 20^th century. It is an unforgettable and immaculate masterpiece on obsession.

“Humbert Humbert, erstwhile college professor, aesthete and tortured romantic is a self-professed ‘nympholept.’ Lolita is the impossibly funny and rapturously beautiful story of Humbert’s total, catastrophic obsession with 12-year-old Delores ‘Lolita” Haze. At once prim and predatory, Humbert will stop at nothing in his frenzy to possess his ‘nymphet,’ first marrying her mother and then embarking with Lolita on a journey across the American landscape, through roadside diners and five-dollar-a-night motels.

“Brimming with gloriously flamboyant word play, Lolita, displays the unparalleled prose style of a master of the English language in a story that also emerges as a transcendent satire on American consumerism.

“Shockingly tender and beautiful, Lolita is suffused with an incandescent wit, sensual detail and articulations of longing and lust that are at once exquisite and grotesque.”

I agree with the use of the word grotesque. Perhaps a sampling of Nabokov’s style is in order:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta; the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Delores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

That’s enough. Nabokov intended to be controversial, and he achieved that. He wrote pedophilia was one of three taboo subjects in America, along with successful interracial marriages and atheists who lead happy and useful lives. Stanley Kubrick did a movie with the same title in 1962, starring James Mason as Humber and Shelley Winters as Lolita’s mother. Peter Sellers was the character who was chasing after Humber and Lolita as they moved about the country. It was remade in 1997 with Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, and Frank Langella. I will have to get around to seeing the movies.

So, it is a famous story that keeps getting retold. Grotesque indeed. Artful, but not my cup of tea.